Personally, after a week of usage, I’ve appreciated the 10.5′ form factor and new display so much, I’ve ended up somewhere in the middle. The 10.5′ iPad Pro feels great to hold with one hand when catching up on Twitter, reading articles saved in Safari, and putting together advanced automations in Workflow. I’ve missed this kind of portability from the 12.9′ iPad Pro, and I’ve enjoyed having a smaller companion to more comfortably work on planes, in the car, or around the house. Plus, the screen is incredible.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up using multiple iPads in the near future, but I know this: the 10.5” iPad Pro is the nicest, most powerful iPad I’ve used to date.

Apple’s in-house chip team continues to amaze. No one buys an iPad because of CPU benchmarks, but the new iPad Pro’s CPU performance is mind-boggling. Forget about comparisons to the one-port MacBook — the iPad Pro blows that machine out of the water performance-wise. The astounding thing is that the new iPad Pro holds its own against the MacBook Pro in single-core performance — around 3,900 on the Geekbench 4 benchmark for the iPad Pro vs. around 4,200–4,400 for the various configurations of 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros.1 Multi-core performance has effectively doubled from the first generation of iPad Pro. That sort of year-over-year increase just doesn’t happen anymore, but here we are. The new iPad Pro gets a multi-core Geekbench 4 score of around 9200; the brand-new Core M3-based MacBook gets a multi-core score of around 6800.

Apple says it makes iPad Pro more powerful than many PC laptops. I’m sure it’s more powerful than some but to me it’s really something different entirely. Old Intel architectures feel like massive transport planes. iPads Pro feel like drop ships out of sci-fi.

I’ve been incredibly impressed with the work of Apple’s silicon team since they were the first to jump to 64-bit on mobile with the A7.